Brainstorming: AI tools may be helpful for brainstorming ideas for research topics, organizing your thoughts, jump-starting your work and tackling writer's block.
Breaking down concepts: Chatbot tools may help you break down and understand a complex concept or unfamiliar topic if your own thought process is stymied in completing an assignment.
Illustrating ideas: Image generation tools may be helpful for presenting or illustrating your work.
Creating new interpretations: AI tools may be useful for creative adaptations.
Summarizing: Some AI tools can synthesize and summarize articles and provide a basic, straightforward overview of the ideas within. This does not typically involve analysis from a Biblical lens or an experiential framework.
Translating: AI tools may help you translate between languages.
Coding: AI tools may help you generate new code and clean up existing code.
Downfall/Limitations of Generative AI Tools
Hallucinations: When using AI tools for research, they may make up credible-sounding citations to sources that do not exist, or give inaccurate information.
Paywalled content: Most AI search tools do not have access to the full range of articles behind a paywall (access you often have through Jackson Library). They may help with initial searching but cannot substitute for a human being and scholarly guidance to this paywalled content.
Scope of training data: AI tools can only produce content based on the data they have been given, so it is important to understand where this data is drawn and what it consists of. This is difficult given that companies producing AI tools are competitive and somewhat secretive about their means and methods.
Reproducibility: Because generative AI tools create new content based on specific data sets chosen and changed over time, the content created is not reproducible. And because these tools create new content, multiple people using the same prompt at the same time will likely get different results. This shifting and shaky ground is not reliable as a foundation for scholarly research.
Ethics, Privacy, etc.: There are numerous limitations related to ethics, privacy, bias, and the creative and moral reasoning inherent to human analysis that is absent from AI. Essentially, every byproduct prepared with an AI tool should be approached with healthy skepticism and verification.
Legal Context: US laws related to AI tools are evolving, and tools to identify AI-created content are not fully effective.
